6 Ways to Get Traffic on Pinterest to Your Blog

So many blogs are doing nothing but worry about SEO and search engines as their main discovery tool. Unfortunately, few are aware of this:

Social discover is overtaking SEO based search as a discovery tool.

As far back as 2013, Buzzfeed noticed how their search numbers were dropping by as much as 30%. They were still, however, sustaining their traffic or even growing! Where Did All The Search Traffic Go? Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit hitting 25% even back then, the importance of thinking of social media as a discovery tool is important.

Of particular note is Pinterest as it’s both a new social platform still bursting with potential, as it hasn’t been done to death like Facebook. This post will give you a few ideas on how you can build a Pinterest audience that will send traffic to your blog when search isn’t cutting it anymore.

6 Ways to Get Traffic on Pinterest to Your Blog

1: Get your visuals right first

The web is a highly visual place as it is. You’re already creating images like crazy for your blog, but optimizing them for Pinterest will make your profile even better, and drive traffic to your blog better.

The first thing you’ll want to do is create images that are the ideal pin size 730 – 1130 pixels has been shown to be best. Once you have them use them on your blog in some way, usually down the side is best. Now pin that image to your Pinterest from your website to create that link back to your blog from Pinterest. This is a basic step that so many blogs get wrong as they create the pin in Pinterest itself, missing out on the key link that drives traffic.

2: Create great pin captions

Once you have the image taken care of, you need to create great captions that both grab people’s interest, and drive them to your website. The strategies to use include:

Using one or two well researched hashtags – no more than three!

Including a key statistic or quote from the blog post.

Giving a brief, one sentence, and summary if the quote or statistic doesn’t explain it perfectly.

Using a link, with a trackable shortener, that has a call to action next to it. “Find out More” is an easy one, you can vary this.

Use your Pinterest analytics dashboard, and your link shortener, to start building an accurate representation of what calls to action are working to move traffic to your website. Also take a look at what type of content is driving traffic to your blog as well – create more of it and keep that traffic flowing!

3: Contribute to boards within your industry

This is going to be your second biggest step to getting more traffic via audience, well, borrowing. These industry leading boards are already going to have lots of traffic. Your challenge is to be a contributor, rather than a spammer.

Good posting:

Answering questions posed on boards

Posting breaking news stories in the industry

Putting up opinion blog posts to stir interest via controversy

General posting that makes you look like an expert

Bad Posting:

Placing ads for your blog that do not contribute to a conversation

Not being 100% on topic

Posting something repeatedly, or posting something very similar to another post

You want to look like, and be, an expert. This will go a long way to improving your social proof on Pinterest. Don’t spam, and don’t jump into something you’re not sure of – do some research before you post!

4: Build Pinterest boards into your blog categories

This is how you’re going to start showing people that your Pinterest account and blog are extensions of one another. Cross-platform marketing is so important online as it makes you look professional, and it builds people’s understanding of who you are.

Check out the Devumi Pinterest account and how it’s organized pins between the main website, the blog, social media, focuses on our biggest topic – Twitter, and has two boards for other people’s pins in Marketing and SEO:

For your blog, try to create a board for each topic or category you cover. Pin images that you created in step one to these boards.

5: Use Rich Pins when you can

Rich Pins come in five different varieties. The type you’ll want to use will vary depending on the content you’re pinning:

Article pins

Location pins

Movie pins

Recipe pins

Product pins

For your blog, obviously you’re going to be using a lot of Article pins. But there are plenty of reasons to use the other pin styles as well.

For Product pins, take note of the fact that you are able to display a lot more product information in them. Also, when a price changes anyone who has repinned that product pin is notified. This may not apply to you if you’re a 100% blog only, but if you’re associating your blog with products this can be a goldmine of recurring referrals.

6: Make your pins SEO friendly

What, you thought we weren’t going to look at SEO at all? Remember that this is about using Pinterest to drive traffic to your blog, and you can use SEO to drive that interest.

To do this, check your Pinterest account settings and look for a phrase that says: “Keep search engines from showing your Pinterest profile in search results.” Uncheck that box so that your pins show up in all search results.

Now what if your pins are all named “IMG23MJ45?” No one is going to search for that, they’re going to search for what’s in the image! Use keywords from your blog posts along with descriptive words for the image itself. For this post I’d use an image file name like “Drive-Blog-Traffic-From-Pinterest” to be found in search results.

Blogs + Pinterest = More traffic on your blog!

The six steps above are a great way to get more blog traffic from Pinterest, but also to have an organized web presence. What Google, and every search engine love more than anything is proper organization. Why is that? Because it’s what users love too! Working on your Pinterest account this way appeases both the search engines, and Pinterest users.

About the Author:

Matthew is the writer and analyst for the Devumi.com Social Media blog. You can read a review of Devumi at the link, or by visiting the blog on Friday when a new article is published. For the Pinterest People who found this article, the Devumi Gorilla is doing his pinning over on Pinterest right now!